7/27/2009 @ 3:20PM

Keep Fighting--With Yourself

Most leadership journeys begin with a struggle with oneself, leaving one’s very core shaken. Bernard Williams, a British moral philosopher who died in 2003, referred to that core as a person’s “ground project,” one’s nexus of essential beliefs and desires. The ground project, he wrote, is what one “takes seriously at the deepest level, as what life is about.” When you struggle with your ground project, you lose your grip on what gave your life identity until now. A new identity takes over. Life takes a U-turn.

Mohandas Gandhi is a case in point. Born in 1869 into a privileged caste in Gujarat, India, he was socially and politically indifferent in his youth–as hard as that may be to imagine. He could afford to be so because his family’s high standing insulated him from caste discrimination.

In 1893 he moved to South Africa to work for an Indian business there for a year, and the experience changed his perspective. His dark skin got him thrown off a train when he refused to leave a first-class carriage for which he had a ticket. He was turned away by hotels because of his race. He was subjected to the kind of mistreatment he had always ignored all around him in India. His ground project was shattered. He found himself questioning his most basic beliefs and even his place in society. His fight with himself began, and so did his journey as a leader.

We see something similar in the life of Charles Darwin. He was destined for a career in the clergy. But that was before his ground project was undone by his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle. What he saw during his five-year journey around the globe forced him to question the biblical account of creation and, with that, his own faith.

Why is the smashing of one’s ground project and the ensuing fight over one’s entrenched beliefs so often the beginning if a leader’s journey? Because we all hold beliefs that we never really challenge unless or until we have to. Most of those beliefs we take on during childhood, when our capacity for soaking up information is at its greatest and our discretionary powers are at their weakest. A child can easily believe things that have no truth in them at all and make them part of his or her ground project, beyond all questioning or doubt.

But then we face our defining moments, moments of truth that assault our ground projects. A mask peels away, and we face a choice of either continuing to believe in something that has been proved wrong or embracing what we newly know is right. If you choose to leave behind your past and grasp what is right, despite your lifelong ground project, you are beginning your journey as a leader.

What does this mean for you personally? First, you should constantly examine your assumptions and beliefs. Test the truth in them. Make sure you don’t believe things just because someone told you so. Test everything, and try to do so with the detachment of a scientist. Believe only after you have conducted your own experiments and they have repeatedly taken you to the same truth. Second, be ready to fight with yourself. When your ground project comes under attack, do not blindly defend it. Expose yourself to critical examination. And if you find a truth in an opposing view, slowly open yourself to the change that it brings.

Leadership takeaway: Leadership begins with a change in oneself. Once we “become the change we want to see,” as Mahatma Gandhi himself once said, we are ready to lead in the service of a larger cause.

Sangeeth Varghese is the founder of LeadCap, a leadership organization in India, and author of Decide to Lead. E-mail him at sangeethv@leadcap.org. For more from Sangeeth Varghese, click here.